Baseball Starts Spectacularly in Holguín

By Amauris Betancourt.

Holguín's baseball team, alias the Pups, played yesterday the first match as Home Club against Metropolitanos in the currently Cuban National Baseball League.

The Major General Calixto García stadium, its headquarters, was sold out. The fans wanted to see the Olympic sub-champion star Luis Miguel Rodríguez pitch but the outstanding supersonic sub-world champion Aroldis Chapman did instead, though both are pillars in the team.
The game fulfilled expectations for followers of the provincial selection with only one defeat in six matches. The main course, the left-handed pitcher Chapman's 10 strikeouts; the best, the two homeruns by Leris Aguilera that helped score seven out of eight runs.

Leris Aguilera's first home run.

Pitcher Rolando Mella closed spectacularly and Holguin is glad with the team’s winning string.
Luis Miguel Rodriguez is expected today at the pitching hill.

The Báguano's Count, as they call him too, was granted before the game started, the Dignity's Microphone (micrófono de la Dignidad), an award from the Provincial Radio Stations Board in Holguín to personalities from different fields.

Cuban Troubadour Threatened by High Tide

By Leandro Estupiñan.

Photos: Amauris Betancourt.

Alta Marea (High Tide), a cultural gathering, is a proposal in the Trouba House in Holguín city headed by troubadour Fernando Cabreja. It is already 10 year old and started off in Moa. When Cabreja and his family decided to settle down in Holguín, they did not only take the color and the memory of their city as well as the mania of the trouba and the compromise to promote cultural highlights through radio programs along with, , but also brought down on their shoulders some significant projects they had created.

In his 25 years of artistic life, Cabreja has won respect over so much for his compositions as for his work as an unrelenting cultural promoter. He has kept alive the Trouba Viva Meeting against all odds. And still now, this space, forged to promote trouba and troubadours from all over the country, goes on in Moa. His commitment to Moa ties him up to keep it on.

Alta Marea, on the other hand, definitely made it to Holguín. It is linked to his passion for literature and poetry, and for local writers. That half-way sickly devotion took him to found a space thought to join friends, to fuse poem and song. Alta Marea is named after the title of one of his songs, included in the recently Como una luna en pie (Like a standing moon) CD.

Still in Moa, he was able to invite guests like poets Alex Pausides and Vladimir Zamora. Now, inviting guests is not a problem because he benefits from living in a provincial capital city.

The gathering is on Thursdays, at the dying afternoon as Sindo Garay would say. The last guests have been writers Rolando Bellido, Lourdes González and Delfín Prats. The environment is pleasant. And it would be better if fans could put apart routine and meet there enthusiastically to have a ball for a while listening to Life trouba music and true poetry.Sponsored by ARTEX (a Cuban art promoting institution), and the Book Provincial Center, the gathering was inaugurated in Holguin last October 2, with guest poet José Luis Serrano.

Poet Jose Luis Serrano.

Cabreja was then already anxiously expecting the results of his concert at the Pablo de la Toerriente Brau Cultural Center, in Havana. It was done in the famous A guitarra limpia cultural gathering, which was meant then for a CD recording.

The CD was launched last November 22 in a fortunate moment for any troubadour: in a concert by Silvio Rodríguez. Thus, next to one of his teachers and in the place where he was given a hand to make his work known, Cabreja launched his 13-track CD.

The classics of his work are there, compiled as a symbol to his honest creative work, to his sensibility, to his worries, and to his vocation as a cultural promoter, because he had invited singing guests such as Ivette Rodríguez, from Baguano municipality and Edelis Loyola, his wife. She confessed that Cabreja had courted her without empty speeches. And so it seems to be the troubadour: An enemy to schemes or, as one of his songs reads: A prisoner to illusion.

Photo Contest Awards around the New Trouba Music

The photo contest jury members around the New Trouba Music (Homage to El Plátano, allias from a a recently dead photographer who devouted part of his live to photographing trouba singers), integrated by photography director Raúl Rodríguez and the photographers Julio Larramendi and Alain Gutiérrez, after checking 23 participants's works, wishes to subscribe, first of all, the quality of the images as a serious approach to the photographic memory of Cuban Trouba Movement perceived by various photographers.

Troubador Silvio Rodriguez attended the photo exhibit.

The jury wishes to acknowledge this contest is an evidence of the efforts accomplished by the Pablo de la Torriente Brau Cultural Center to encourage and to spread out the artist's works from all generations and trends in the New Cuban Trouba. The photo contest shows too, the assortment and quality in the Island’s photographic world, and fosters involvement and historic documentation of concerts, gatherings and other types of events where Cuban troubadours play a starring role.

Cuban movie actor Jorge Perugorría.

The jury agreed unanimously, granting the following rewards, mentions and acknowledgment:

First: Picking up out of all sent photos those depicting the spirit of the Trouba Movement in an attractive and original way to be exhibited (jury selection). Such a decision favored the following photographers:

Joseph Ignacio Vázquez López

Yordanka Caridad Almaguer Delgado

Enrrique Smith Soto

Carolina Vilches Monzón
Alejandro Bueno García

Ricardo Rodriguez.

Jose Meriño.

Second: Granting mentions to the following photographers, due to the aesthetic and moral values as well as the treatment of the contest theme:

Amauris Betancourt Gómez

J. Gonzalo Vidal A.

George Daniel Villa Hernández
Third: Granting the three following awards according to the contest's bases:

Because he rescues and he keeps alive the memory of a generation and of a musical movement in a unpublished image, the third award is granted to:

Joseph Michael Carassou Morales
Because he gets across and is able to sum up in a single image the troubadour's passions and his greatness, the second award is granted to:

Kaloian Santos Cabrera.

Because of the subtle remark and simplicity of the image and the excellent general plane to suggest a message, the first Prize is granted to:

Richard Pérez de la Rionda